Saturday, 13 June 2009

A world of triviality

One of the ways in which the devil keeps people asleep in their sins is by filling their lives with the trivial. When the trivial becomes accepted as important, the value of the currency of the really important is degraded. If there's enough pseudo-important things to fill the time, then it's easier to not find time for the actually important. Many actually important things make people without Christ uncomfortable, so until God awakens them they're happy enough to go along with this. Which brings me to this BBC news story title:

"Services to golf" ? Now come on. He's an incredibly talented fellow who's invested vast amounts of time in developing his God-given talent which has brought pleasure to many thousands, and that in itself is a good thing. (I'm not here going into other issues - the ethics of professional sport, playing on the Lord's Day, his divorce and adultery, etcetera). But golf is not a master that it is a great sacrifice to serve, especially when one is vastly personally enriched and gains thousands of devoted fans in the process. Gold is a leisure activity! A sport! It's a privilege to play it for fun and get paid for the privilege! Ultimately golf in and of itself is a trivial activity. The "service" rendered by Nick Faldo to society is vastly less than that of the life-long dustman who patiently and dutifully goes about his business, keeping his cog in the great machine going so that everybody else can contribute their part without hindrance. That's more like a genuine service, because it didn't come with thousands of fans or millions of pounds or personal fame, and was something that actually helped civilisation keep going, unlike the practice of driving down the fairway.

The principle of the state awarding celebrities rewards for their "service" began years ago now and we hardly bat an eyelid. It's part of the transformation of society to a society that is so fixated by the trivial that the non-trivial is squeezed out. Marx thought that religion was "the opium of the masses". But when society was more religious, it was also vastly more serious. Marx has been proved wrong. It's his disciples (though they don't often dare to name his name), the political class of the last few decades, who have fed the masses the opium of triviality (celebrity culture, politicians made for television, benefits and unnecessary medication by the barrel-load) to keep everybody sedated so that their own goals can be advanced.

If and when the UK repents, spending so much time and energy on the trivial will be one of the chief sins to repent of. God lent us a life - and what are we spending it on? And on that note, it's time to stop!